Five Outside The Box Link Building Strategies You Can Implement Today!

Building links solely through directories, articles, and guest blog posts is the archaic way of building links and if not supplemented with higher quality, natural links, you are going to find yourself struggling to compete in the search engines in a hurry.

Not only that, but building links like those mentioned above is extremely boring and you will find yourself and your team getting burned out quickly if you don’t put together some creative link strategies.

In today’s post, I’m going to address five “outside the box” ways to not only build links, but attract links, which is FAR more important. Let’s jump right in…

Interview Experts

One of the best ways to attract links to your website is to interview experts and post their responses on your blog. I’ve done this countless times, both in this industry, and in others and it works amazingly well.

So how do you get links when you interview an expert? Most of the time the expert either has a personal website, a company website, or both. Once you interview them, you can ask them to link to your piece, better yet, give them a unique piece of content (guest post) for them to post on their site announcing the interview. You can also ask them to share the content with their network of followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, etc.

I have found that 99% of the time, those individuals who I interview will at least share it on Facebook and Twitter, sending boat loads of traffic to my post. This also leads to more shares and links from those who find your post interesting. I’m telling you, this is a MONEY strategy!

Digital Assets

Another great way to attract links to your web site is by putting together digital assets like infographics, micrographics, whitepapers, eBooks, Etc. Infographics are great because they help make complex data easy to understand and when you do this, people like to link to them.

The key to generating links from your digital assets is to ask for the link back. In the case of an infographic, you should provide an embed code at the bottom of the post where people can quickly copy and paste it into one of their blog posts.

Lastly, you should put some promotion around each digital asset you put together. If you need help with some promotion strategies, check out this fantastic post.

Sponsor An Event

A very simple way to generate links to your website is to sponsor an event. Events like industry conferences, ALWAYS list each sponsor and in most cases, link back to their websites.

Another perk of sponsoring an event is that you are usually provided a free pass and if interesting enough, you can go and take advantage of what’s being discussed. To me, this is a win-win!

One thing you need to keep in mind is that sometimes, your link will be taken down in the future, which means that you will often times have to keep sponsoring their events. If you are a small company, this can get costly, so I’d look to sponsor on time events in hopes that the link will stay live for a long time.

Assist A Non-Profit

I absolutely love helping non-profits because it is an amazing way to give back to others. In our industry, we can give away services and consulting to help non-profits better optimize their websites for the search engines. I’ve found that in most cases, helping a non-profit will get you a link, so don’t discount this strategy.

The best part about this link strategy is that it doesn’t require any cash. If you have some excess capacity or product lying around, you can help a non-profit. Just make sure that your offer is “no strings attached” meaning, it won’t the non-profit money in the end. It needs to truly be free to them.

Give Away Valuable Stuff

Wanna know what people love more than free stuff? Free stuff that is actually valuable to them! One company that is doing this extremely well right now is Signs.com. The digital marketing team over there have come up with some awesome giveaways like their Spring Cling giveaway and their alphabet wall decal giveaway that they are promoting through several external websites. These giveaways are not only helping them attract new links, but also generating visibility through social media, which is huge for their business.

The trick here is taking some time to truly understand who your target audience is and what they would like for free. If you find the right people and give away the right things, you will get massive visibility!

So there you have it… Five “outside the box” link strategies that you can start implementing today. What other unique link strategies are you using to attract links? Please share with us in the comments section below.

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About Greg Shuey

Greg is a member of the executive team at Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution.
Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy.
You can follow Greg on Twitter. Circle him on Google+, and connect with him on LinkedIn

One Comment

Hi Greg, this is the first time on your blog and I find this post very informative. When it comes to linkbuilding linkable assets is the starting point of any linkbuilding strategy, from a kick ass webdesign, a solid post. I think that’s where linkbuilding starts. It always starts within the website.